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DOS: Reasons to prefer it above Windowz

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Predator:
I like to think if you're gonna be doing basic programming and text operatoins DOS would be the best choice. Straightforward and quick and effecient. BEEEEEYOUTEEFOOL

Aloone_Jonez:
I fine the DOS command line interface easier to use than BASH, even though BASH is meant to be more powerful. DOS is very small and it is great for simple programs where you don

Aloone_Jonez:
Wine and DOSEMU can run DOS programs under Linux but I don't know which does a better job. I'm going to install both, and then see for myself.

Has any one else used DOS programs under these computability layers, and if so are they any good?

I would like to run COMMAND.COM for now until I get more used to BASH, will Wine or DOSEMU let you do this?

WMD:
If you look deeply into it, you'd realize that DOS is pretty awful.

Reliability.  It seemed good on that front, but only because it ran one app at a time.  If you tried to run DOS Shell and multitask with it, it was horrible.

Memory Management.  It's real mode, it works with 640k of program memory and needed multiple kludges to work any better (UMA, HMA).  Only way around it was a software protected mode driver (which was only so good).

Drivers.  If you install MS-DOS 6.2 (1993), by default these things won't work:
mouse
CD-ROM
sound
video (beyond hardware VESA)

So, you were stuck doing nothing on there until you found drivers and loaded them all.  There were none included.

Command line.  The DOS prompt was pretty weak, and with no work done on it in ages, it can't do much of anything.

Linux, QNX, and others can scale down pretty well to 4MB RAM, since it'd be stripped down a lot on an embedded system.  DOS doesn't have much of a purpose anymore.

[ August 19, 2004: Message edited by: WMD ]

Aloone_Jonez:
I'm talking about FreeDOS, MS-DOS sucks.

FreeDOS in good for embedded systems, and it's good secutiry wise, I haven't tried this but if you have a non-winmodem and boot into a FAT32 partition and then use a DOS web browser, if you get infected all you do is reformat and reinstall and as DOS is so small it shouldn't take more than 5 minutes.

DOS shell was shit there are better multi taskers around, and a DOS extender is a must, 640k of memory in 64k blocks was shit in 1994 and it's fucking terrible today.

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